How to Shrink an Image File Size to use on the Web

If you need to decrease the size of your image before uploading it onto your website, there are many different programs that you can use.  For this example we are using GIMP, which is a free image editor.  Please read this article for information to assist in downloading and installing GIMP.

First, open GIMP and use File -> Open to open the image that you want to edit.  In this example, we will edit the logo for Web Hosting Hub.  When your image loads in GIMP, it will look similar to this:

If you want to keep the file the same dimensions but decrease the size of the file, we will simply save the file in a lower quality.  To do this, click "File" then "Save" in your Toolbar, which will bring up the following box:

You can use the "Quality" bar to change the size of the file.  By default it will be at 85.  Try moving it down to 50, and saving the image.  It may take some adjusting to find the perfect balance (making the image size smaller but still look good), but remember that when you have the image on your website the smaller the size the faster it will load for the customer.